“It's the same old crap,” Moon said this week. “It's always a comparison of one black to another black. I get tired of it. I get tired of defending it. If you want to compare him to someone because of his demeanor, compare him to Jay Cutler.”

Fair enough — except Cutler isn't a tall quarterback who led his college team to the national championship and became an NFL Rookie of the Year in the next season.

Unlike Newton and Young.

But if Moon overreacted, and he admitted as much Wednesday, he has reason to.

Sports pioneers often don't show wounds at the time they are cut. Hank Aaron handled himself with dignity through his career, for example, and only after he retired did he reveal the anger his treatment had created. At times, the Hammer had been treated like a nail.

Moon didn't live in Aaron's world, but his own era and his own sport required similar restraint. After leading the University of Washington to the Rose Bowl while also encountering some racism and jeers, he found NFL scouts were cool to him.

Why?

“They used to say I didn't come out of a pro-style offense,” Moon said later. “And they didn't think I had the arm strength to play in the NFL, that I was too short, all the same things. I'm the same height I was then ... and my arm was a lot stronger than it is now. I didn't understand it. I just wanted somebody to come out and take a look at me, and I couldn't get that.”

There were few black NFL quarterbacks then. So Moon opted to sign with the Canadian Football League's Edmonton Eskimos before the draft. There, he played on five championship teams and threw for more than 20,000 yards.

And when the Houston Oilers signed him? This is a subject the franchise addressed with its new player: The racism that Moon might face.

Moon said he rarely heard anything in those years, and he just as rarely talked about it. But it was there.

“The more the Oilers struggle,” a Houston Chronicle reporter wrote in 1991, “the more racial slurs I am hearing.”

Moon lived with color as a defining characteristic throughout his career, and he couldn't escape that even when he achieved his sport's greatest honor. Then, Moon became the first black quarterback inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

His achievements also weren't the only ones he counted. When Doug Williams was the winning Super Bowl quarterback, Moon said, “Tears came to my eyes.”

It was about shattered stereotypes, and it was about enduring.

“I dealt with everything,” Moon said after he retired. “Death threats, hate mail, guards with guns. I dealt with a lot of things that people weren't aware of. I didn't talk about it because I didn't want to bring any more attention to it.”